Despite my better judgement I’ll release the work-in-progress FAQ page I’ve been writing for a while now since people don’t seem to read the forums, and to be honest it’s getting a little daunting that I don’t have control over the website layout >_<

I am a new “pencil” user. I am not sure if this is the correct place for my question.
I have some paper drawings. I have scanned them used edit - import image so that the first of my drawings is inserted on the first frame (bitmap layer).

I can use the rubber and the pencils and edit the drawing but I cannot select a part of the image and move it (with dotted rectangle).

I would like to copy the same picture on another frame, but on a different position (shifted), as if the character was walking.

YES, you can move parts of a drawing, and you can copy them from one frame to another, BUT you can’t flip over a drawing yet (I hope i’m understanding what you need correctly).

We apologize for this but our developers are working very hard to improve on this behaviour so there will be a proper move / selection tool in the near future.

In this short video I recorded I show how to use the selection tool and how to copy & paste a drawing from one frame to the other, also I show a workaround to flip a drawing horizontally if you decide to give Pencil a go.

I forgot to mention at the end that using the snapshot tool will take a flattened image / composite, so the white colour behind the character will also appear in the flipped drawing that you paste, instead of being just the strokes.

I’ll have you know that the white bckground for pencil is just for show, in reality every drawing is being drawn over a transparent background, so when you export the drawing only the lines drawn with the program or any bitmap image that you imported will be shown in the final render.

For now this is the easiest solution I’ve come up with without having to use heavier or more difficult programs. Depending on the complexity of your drawing you’ll have to clean the remaining whitespace.

@admin Hey man! good to see you <3 Hmm To be honest I had to put that big notice in the about page, because I think no one that visits the site uderstand that the top manu bar is actually a menu bar! We’ve had many people complaining and asking “where do I download this?” “how do I use this?” I think most people are not aware that there are several menus nested “inside the words”

If possible I’d put the FAQ on a menu of it’s own, as I was also thinking of making a developer FAQ for new people that want to contribute but don’t know where to start.

@ironcross49 I apologize first if I don’t understand your question correctly. I’ll try to answer the two scenarios that I think answer your question as I understand it. If none of this answer your problem, please try to be a bit more specific. If you want you can even try to post a series of screenshots for your problem.

1)Canvas (Workspace) Translation: this will move the image “visually” to ease drawing, but it won’t affect the original drawing position i.eit won’t move the drawing in the animation.

A) Press & Hold the spacebar and a hand icon will appear, click and drag with the hand tool

B) Select the hand tool from the toolbox to the left. Click & drag the canvas to move it.

2)Image (Drawing) Translation: You can move selected parts of images from their original drawing position & they will appear animated from frame to frame by changing places.

To do this you need to:

A) Pick the selection tool (it’s the dotted square icon)

B) Left Click & Drag a dotted marquee over the part of your drawing that you want to move.

C) With the selection active, select the Move Tool (Press Q or click over the Black Arrow Icon)

D) Left Click & Drag from the center of the dotted marquee towards the outside. Without letting go of the button take your cursor to an approximate position of where you would like to move that part of your drawing. The selection won’t appear to move, but once you release the left click, the selected part will move accordingly

E) Click outside the selection marquee / dotted square to finish the selection process. If you don’t do this, when you go to a different frame, whatever piece of drawing that was in the same area of the selection, for that particular frame, will move to the new position.

For a bit more explanation of the latter method, please watch the first part of this FAQ answer where we explain briefly how the selection tool works combined with the move tool. In this video it is used for copying and pasting a drawing between frames as well as moving it around the canvas.

Hi, I am new to Pencil and I’m sorry if you are sick of this question, because I know its been asked before but I can’t find where the answer was posted;

when I try to fill with the bucket tool it only fills red regardless of the colour selected. I have tried enlarging the area being filled and have made sure it is enclosed properly but it still won’t work.

Also, I have tried the “click and drag” method to move a frame and it won’t do this either, is there another way of moving frames along the timeline?

Match your operative system and try out the build for January 15th 2016 …the name of the file you have to download in the google drive link should appear like this:

Pencil2D-win-20160114.zip

Once you download the file, just unzip it and run the Pencil.exe and it will run. You don’t need to install it.

Try out the same steps as you do with the old version, and let us know if it works properly. That would mean the problem has been fixed. If it doesn’t work, please try to write down which steps you take, in the new version now, so our developers can reproduce the problem and fix it for later versions.

I’ll be pending for your response. Please let us know if it works or not. Thanks!

Hi, I’m new to the program. I’ve been looking for a hand drawing program to try out and am really excited to try this program! The one thing though is when I go to use my Wacom tablet there is about a 2 second delay between my stroke and it actually being drawn. Is this something someone has asked before and is there a solution to it?

@sky009 We are aware of this problem and our developers are working to solve it properly for a future release. Every platform suffers from it, so don’t worry you’re not alone.

The only thing I can recommend you to ease the problem is to make the Pencil2D window smaller than your full screen size, that means that you have to pull the edges of the software window in order to occupy less screen space, as we have found that when it’s actually a smaller size, the drawing is “refreshed” faster. Hence your strokes shouldn’t take as long, but note this is only a temporary solution and we will work towards fixing this. Thank you for your understanding, hope this helps.

I think this FAQ is cool, but maybe you could create a table of content listing all questions, with a link to the answers, on top of the FAQ? It’s a bit complicated to search particular things :’(

You could maybe manually add anchors on each title/question and make a list of link pointing to each anchor. I don’t know if an easier way exist on wordpress to create table of contents, my method is pretty barbarian ^^’

@darckcrystale You are correct my dear. We could totally use a category table. However I’m not the webmaster so my edits are severely limited.

I’m planning to make the FAQ a bit more…interactive in the future, but that takes time and I’m quite busy these days. The anchors are not working properly in this wordpress template for some reason (they always jump beyond their intended line) and I’m waiting for our webmaster to update the whole website theme to something a bit more easy for both users and moderators so we can take advantage of that.

For now rest assured that the FAQ is a “live document”, that means it’s not set in stone and it will change with time, as it was devised to answer the incredibly constant flux of familiar questions that we get. Particularly for the “export” issue and why Pencil2D is not exactly what users expect it to be

I’ll see how I can patch it up to make it less daunting, but for now that’s what we can have in such short notice. Thank you for voicing your concern! have a wonderful day <3

@darckcrystale Would you mind taking a look at the FAQ now? I managed to make an html table to organize the entries. For now it’s just to see if it helps other people to reach the content faster, later I’ll see how to organize it better. Let me know and thank you for your suggestions <3